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Monika Mitchell's blog

Monika is an entrepreneur and internationally known business ethics and women’s leadership expert. Monika spent 10 years working in the Wall Street fixed income securities industry as the Chief Operating Officer for a talent recruiting firm serving the largest financial institutions in the world. She is member of the United Nations Global Compact and founding member of the NGO Values & Business Working Group where she focuses on economic empowerment for women in developing nations. Her passions include sustainable business, economic reform and U.S. financial history. She is co-author of the up-coming book: Conversations with Wall Street: The Inside Story on the Financial Armageddon and How to Prevent the Next One. Monika has a theatrical background which helps to entertain Good-b audiences and sometimes she is known to break out in song spontaneously and shuffle-kick her way down Broadway. She founded Good Business International, Inc. (Good-b) in 2008 based on her deep belief in the need for 21st century business to become a social force for good.

Good-b Editor’sNote: Collective food coops have been booming in the San Francisco-Bay Area for decades. Only in recent years have these emerged in urban neighborhoods like Brooklyn. In true New York style, you don’t even have to leave your home to get to the farm. Now a new start-up called, “Farmigo” from SF can bring the food coop to your door. But is it’s deliver system sustainable? Check it out below.

It’s that time of year again when I vacation with the President and his family on Martha’s Vineyard. Well, we are not exactly together. But the 3 miles that separate us make it almost seem as if we were. The Big O, his lovely Michelle and the girls are just down the road apiece in Chilmark. “Up-island” we call it here on the Vineyard.

Each MV August, since Bill and Hillary’s well-publicized vacations in the late 1990s, I have a chance to think about the...

It all started the day the world ended. The world as we knew it that is. September 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank in the modern world, came crashing down. On that day, we began a fast and furious downward debt spiral. Panic set it, fear took over and the rest, as they say, is history.

We could really claim that the end of the booming world we knew began its deep slide even before that – on April 28, 2004. That was the day that the Securities & Exchange Commission lifted a small and innocuous “rule” that led to enormous consequences. The “...

In case you had not heard, America’s very own Benedict Arnold, rating agency Standard & Poor’s, downgraded the United States credit from Triple A to Double A in an act of sheer fiscal and political recklessness. The price of credit has just become substantially more expensive at a time when low cost credit is surely the best cure.

That they could do worse than they have already done this past decade is astonishing. But kudos to S&P for showing that they have a spine…even if it is attached to a tail.

Hallelujah! Salvation is here. Or so we are supposed to believe. The 3 Ring Circus that is two branches of Congress and the Administration is finally close to an accord on debt mania madness. What a surprise. Not…

We all knew this would happen—very simply because it had to. First and foremost, if the debt ceiling was not raised, 100 senators and 435 congressional reps would be on the unemployment lines with the rest of America. (Not a bad thought). So to save their jobs and to save face, the government by the self-serving, for the self-serving,...

Good-b CEO Monika Mitchell is the co-author of the upcoming book: Conversations with Wall Street: The Inside Story on the Financial Armageddon That Was and How to Prevent the Next One.

So here we are again, in economic LaLa land, waiting for the life raft that will save us from ourselves. The financial news this week is bittersweet for both Wall Street and Main Street. We are told the economy is getting “better,” yet the reality experienced on both sides of the Street reveals the truth.

The End of the World is nigh. Saturday, May 21 to be precise. Uh oh—that’s today! So if you feel any rumblings while reading this—my apologies. According to the co-founder of Family Radio network, the nearly century-old Harold Camping is predicting “the Rapture” will begin this week and in five months the world as we know it will officially end. This would be a surefire...

The diminutive gentleman sitting behind the enormous prop desk of the premier episode of the “The Amazing Federal Reserve” was none other than Chairman Ben Bernanke. The momentous occasion was billed as the “first press conference ever.” The unusual YouTube hour had all the staged contrivance of a tacky reality TV show. Fanfare leading up to the April 27 premier was much more exciting than the disappointing rhetoric that filled it. Like the fake reality show it is, the Federal Reserve wants...

It is really all in the way you think about it. Is it murder or justice? Debt or equity? Budget deficit or moral deficit?

As we struggle with the do’s, dont’s and maybes of the continuing financial reform debate, pearls of wisdom come from the strangest places. Last week’s press conference with John Travolta, John Gotti Jr. might be assumed an unusual source to derive insight. Yet Gotti Jr.’s words as he sat next to a botoxed Lindsay Lohan and Sister Victoria were profound.

It’s a New Year and a time for new beginnings… Each year we look back and see what we hoped to achieve and how far we have come—both personally and collectively.

2010 began with a painful economic recovery. We were told by official government sources that everything was getting better. Yet unemployment increased, banks closed, foreclosures continued, consumers defaulted and bankruptcies exploded. In the business world, millions of small, medium and big enterprises shut their doors. Credit was restricted and working America struggled to stay afloat....

It’s been a heck of a year for the Ladies. We have declared ourselves at war – with the status quo and with the state of our second-class citizenship in politics, business, finance, religion, social, sexual and civil rights.

When Hillary Clinton’s vibrant and powerful campaign for president ended twenty-eight months ago, we thought women had lost. We wondered whether we were pushed to the sidelines again. A mere two years later, Hillary is one of the most important players on the world stage and women by the millions are inspired to lead through her...

The irony of the official monetary policy and its tragic turn is found in the words of the Fed Chairman. When asked about the absence of small business credit, Bernanke explained to Scott Pelley that small business is cut out of credit due to bailed-out banks unwillingness to lend. Why?...

In a rare interview with 6o Minutes’ Scott Pelley on Sunday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke explained the widening income gap in the U.S. between rich and poor has created two societies. The irony is that the Fed’s own actions are primarily responsible for this shift in wealth over the last few years. Never mind that Grandpa Ben looks a kindly old Santa Claus. He is Kris Kringle only for Wall Street—not

Washington DC – Elizabeth Warren spoke candidly today about the “epic David & Goliath fight” she led with the help of two hundred plus consumer agencies, bloggers like me, and outraged citizens at town hall meetings around the nation. Ms. Warren has singlehandedly championed the idea of a consumer protection agency that will actually serve consumers— not pretense. She is the Ralph Nader of our time.

Warren speaks of herself and the hundreds of millions of American families as “David” versus the enormously powerful bank lobbying force that has become our...

Vikram Pandit, CEO of the once dead-in-the-water global banking firm Citigroup has staged a comeback that is sure to be the envy of his financial industry colleagues. So greatly is he admired that only a few months ago he was named Euromoney’s “Banker of the Year.” That’s not a joke. Why? Because, “He did a pretty good job,” states Euromoney. I guess reviving a brain dead bank with a trillion dollar government resuscitator merits some kudos, if not sheer admiration...

I traveled 15 hours to get to the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” on Saturday in Washington, D.C. Where did I come from? New York City. Was that insane?

What drove me to sit in Holland Tunnel traffic for 2 hours on a Friday night and crawl down the New Jersey Turnpike was probably the same thing everyone else en route was motivated by: Passion! A passion for having our voices heard, a passion for making the statement that our country is not controlled by extremists or haters, a passion for openly declaring our love for country, freedom, mutual tolerance and our way of life....

As a blogger at Good Business(Good-B), I usually write about money, not politics. This year, however, the two are indistinguishable. Make no mistake, American politics in 2010 are all about money—who has it, who doesn’t and who wants it at any cost.

The economy continues to teeter on disaster two years after the Fall of the Great Lehman Empire. The crash was heard around the world and reverberates in our lives to this day. Massive unemployment, foreclosure nightmares and millions of businesses closing their...

We did not fix the banking system, Columbia University economics professor Joseph Stiglitz told the well-heeled audience at the World Business Forum this week.

The Feds pulled the big banks back from the brink of oblivion, but left everyone else up a creek without a paddle. You know who the fortunate few are – Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Capital One, and American Express among others.

Steven Levitt, co-author with Stephen Dubner of “Freakonomics” makes complex economics both accessible and entertaining. Perhaps this is why his book sold four million copies. Ordinary folks can finally understand the economy we live in. Part Jon Stewart, part Bill Gates, the self-deprecating and affable Levitt rocked the World Business Forum audience with economic straight talk. The world-renowned economist warns that mainstream economists will become “irrelevant” if...

I did not know what to expect from Jim Collins, author of “From Good to Great.” Was this another business strategy that could only be read in a book or would this translate to real life and the everyday reality of business? His words were transformational. Business, says Collins is “simply a subset of human life…great human stories and great human enterprise. Great adventure, great leaders.” It is a “human quest in one way or another.”

Get ready, set, go! The home of the famous Rockettes, Radio City Music Hall, will be turned into a buzzing business conference full of movers and shakers in the world of commerce. The famous high-kickers will lend their stage to some of the business world’s highest producers. The 2010 World Business Forum opens Tuesday, October 5 at 9:00am and Good-B Blogger Monika Mitchell will be there in the Blogger’s Hub to report. The Forum is reportedly the largest business event in the United States where...

You’ve come a long way baby. That was the message of Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and author of “When Everything Changed” at last weekend’s Omega Institute “Women & Power: Our Time To Lead” conference. Ms. Collins explained to the hundreds of women in attendance that back in 1960 women could not wear “slacks” in public. She reminds us that it was a man’s world in the most primitive sense a mere 50 years ago.